Market your Patent to a Retailer

What if you don’t want the burden of mass-producing, promoting, and selling your patented invention? What if you just want sell it off to a retailer who can do all the dirty work and send you royalties while you move on to the next project? Inventors opt for this route all the time!  And while it is not quite as easy as invention infomercials make it seem, it is very much do-able. Let’s dive in and learn how it’s done.

First, let’s dispel a common myth: that you need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars paying third parties to promote your invention for you. The typical invention infomercial tells you that the best chance of marketing your patent to a business is to pay them lots of money to spread the word about it. This is almost always a scam. Even if it weren’t, you simply don’t need to pay other people to do this for you.

In fact, inventors with patents can bypass this chump’s game and do most (if not all) of their patent marketing themselves. All one needs is some knowledge about how companies evaluate patents and how to emphasize the benefits of theirs.

The first step is to determine which company you should be making your pitch to. For example, the inventor of a new kind of guitar effects pedal might assume he should market his patent to Guitar Center or Sam Ash. In reality, he should probably focus on companies like Gibson or Fender, ie, companies who make and manufacture guitars.

He might even want to go further down the chain and approach the company who creates sound equipment, if this is a different company. The closer you can get to the physical implementation of your idea, the more likely it is that your presentation will be favorably received.

The reason for this is simple. The higher up you go, the more layers your idea will have to pass through until it reaches the people whose lives will be concretely affected by it. Not only that, but other people will not market your patent with the energy and enthusiasm that you will.

Once you identify the company you need to speak to, you need to work on what you will say to them. This is arguably the most important part of marketing your patent to a retailer. To keep our example of a new kind of guitar pedal; you want to emphasize that your pedal is unique and highly desirable. Be specific whenever possible, as this will drive the point home far better than simply stating that your product is great. For instance, you might emphasize that your pedal appeals to the legions of hard rock fans who grew up wanting their guitars to sound like Slash or Eddie Van Halen. The idea is to focus on benefits to the company and its customers, rather than hype and self-promotion (or the bland, cookie-cutter “promotion” most infomercial services are likely to offer.)

Once you have prepared a clear, benefit-driven presentation, the final step is to make the pitch. Generally, you will find a business development mailing address or e-mail address on the company website. Just send them a short, to-the-point note saying that you have a business proposal you would like to discuss. Make sure you include enough details to get their attention, but not so much that your note becomes a novel.

Above all, maintain confidence in yourself and your invention. If you have carefully though things through, you do not need expensive idea promotion companies or convoluted schemes to market your patent to retailers. Simply knowing what they are interested in and what matters to them will let you construct all of your efforts around that.

By the way: this is the core of any successful attempt to market, sell, or license a patent. Keep a relentless focus on what’s in it for them, and it’s hard to go wrong. Good luck!

PatentHelpNow.com is a website dedicated to providing inventors with free patent help. You can contact us at: PatentHelpNow@gmail.com